


Jane (Working Title)

by thraenthraen



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 16:44:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5709652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thraenthraen/pseuds/thraenthraen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Motherhood has been far stranger than Ana ever expected. Weird things, the sorts of things you simply can't explain in any reasonable way, always seem to happen around her daughter Jane. Ana has always thought of herself as a rational, logical sort of person, but her daughter has put irrational, illogical thoughts her brain. Thoughts about superpowers and magic and other worlds. Being a single mother certainly was a lot harder than Ana could have ever expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jane (Working Title)

Ana had lost her mind. That was the only reasonable explanation for what she had just seen—or what she’d thought she’d seen, rather. Ana’s four year-old daughter had picked up her teddy bear, and then instead of a teddy bear, there was a cat. A live cat. A real one. It was purring.

It was hardly the first time something strange had happened with the girl, but Ana had always found explanations, however farfetched. But this? There was a cat sitting on her daughter’s lap, and a teddy bear had disappeared. There was no explaining this. Time for drastic measures, she decided, pulling her mobile from her jeans pocket.

“Ana!” Her mother picked up almost immediately. “What a pleasant—wait, is everything okay? You look—”

“Say hi to grandma, Jane!” Ana slipped down to the floor beside her daughter and the cat and got them in view of the camera. 

“Gramma!” Jane giggled.

“You have a cat!” Ana’s mother said. Ana knew the look on her face, the you-can’t-afford-that look. “When did you get a cat?”

“I made a kitty!” Jane was ecstatic. 

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen it,” Ana told her mother, trying to sound calm. “Jane, what happened to Roberto?” Roberto is what Jane had named the now-vanished bear.

“Roberto is a kitty!” She picked the cat up around its middle and pushed him toward the camera. 

“Careful, Jane,” Ana said, taking the cat from her. “Kitties don’t usually like to be held like that.” She set the cat down beside Jane, and Roberto the cat ran off, tail in the air. Jane’s face fell.

“Roberto! Come back!” She leapt up after him. Ana quickly tapped her screen to switch to the outward-facing camera and kept her daughter in its sight in case something happened again. 

“Careful, Jane. Cats like to be left alone.” She followed Jane and Roberto into her own bedroom and watched as her daughter’s hands grabbed hold of the cat’s tail. A moment later, Ana’s mother screamed. Jane was holding a teddy bear.

“I fixed him, mum,” Jane said, holding up Roberto the teddy bear to her mother. “Now he won’t run away.” A million questions raced through Ana’s mind. What had just happened? Where was the cat? Did Jane do that? How did Jane do that? Was the cat just an illusion? Had the cat ever existed? Was the cat _dead_? Oh God, did Jane just kill a cat? Was her child a cold-blooded killer who could turn you into a teddy bear? Or was Roberto a cat who hid in the form of a teddy bear? Maybe it was a form of hibernation? No, that didn’t make sense—

“ANA!” Her mother’s voice suddenly broke through her thoughts. Ana glanced back at the screen, tapped to switch back to forward facing, and then realised that Jane was no longer in sight. She rushed back to the kitchen and breathed a sigh of relief. Her daughter was sitting on the floor, reading a book to Roberto the Bear Who Might Also Secretly Be A Shapeshifting Cat.

“You saw that, right?” Ana looked at her mother again.

“I don’t know what I saw.” Her face was pale, and not just from the light of the phone screen.

“Okay,” Ana said, trying to calm herself. “Okay, I’m going to finish making dinner. I’ll call you when I put Jane to bed, yeah? I need to...” She trailed off, not really knowing what she needed.

“I’ll keep my phone with me. Try to breathe. It’s probably nothing, just a trick of the light.” 

“Right, okay, talk to you soon.”

“Bye.” Ana hung up the phone. She looked back at her daughter. Everything looked so normal. If Ana could just forget that she had ever seen that bear turn into a cat—and the dozens of other strange things that had happened over the past four years—she could believe that everything was perfectly normal. But, she was beginning to realise, it wasn’t.


End file.
